"Little Sister," a view from China

BEIJING -- I'm told over here at Peking University that one
book a day is being published in the United States about
China. Some of these are excellent reviews of modern events
such as "China Wakes" (Random House, 1994) by New York
Times reporters Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn.
Others are memoirs like "Coming Home Crazy" and the new
"Little Sister" (Viking, 1996) by Julie Checkoway.

I read "Little Sister" on a recent 14-hour flight from San
Francisco to Hong Kong and the small book -- only 230 pages
long -- was over much too soon. Checkoway is a graduate of
Havard-Radcliffe and the Iowa's Writers Workshop. She
currently is an assistant professor in creative writing at
the University of Georgia, Atlanta.

Checkoway describes her nearly yearlong stay in the
industrial city of Shijiazhuang, four hours south of
Beijing, and the stories of five women she meets and becomes
friends with. The year was 1987 and she was 24.

She tells the tale of Fan Chun, Comrade Wen, Hong Xin, An
and Gao. Fan Chun, a woman with a horribly disfigured hand,
tells her the story of the industrial fire that nearly took
her life. She watches Comrade Wen, a woman who loves Western
dancing, lie to her parents about an engagement and wedding
that can never take place because her lover is a married
man. An, a divorced woman, is so desperate to find a new man
to save her that she submits to a foreign interview by a fat
old American cowboy from Montana. An is one of more than 100
women he interviews by having them sing and dance in front
of him.

Hong Xin, a physical education teacher, tells her own story
of lost love as she describes the man she gave up for the
glory of the Red Guards.

She also tells the story of Gao, a TV news reporter. Gao was
a member of the Red Guards in the '70s, "a revolutionary
with blazing eyes." Although Gao had been raised as a
Buddhist, when the Cultural Revolution came along she joined
with other students in destroying the temples at which she
had once worshiped. When Mao died in 1976 and the Gang of
Four fell, Deng Xiaoping eventually came to power and called
for more freedom of thought. Gao looked inside herself and
discovered she had been unfaithful to everything she had
been brought up to believe in.

"I no longer worship Mao Zedong. I no longer worship my
husband. I no longer worship any man," she told Checkoway.

Gao's plan to take her daughter and leave her husband hinged
on the successful publication of a novel, her own thinly
disguised autobiography. When Checkoway first met Gao, the
manuscript had been tentatively accepted for publication.
Gao had merely to complete the final chapters. But in the
spring, Checkoway is with Gao at the publisher's office when
the completed manuscript is rejected. Publishing a book on
Buddhism is a political risk the publisher decides he does
not want to take.

"What if things change in Beijing?" he asks. Gao is
heartbroken.

Years later, back in the United States, Checkoway meets up
with Hong Xin, the P.E. teacher, who tells her that Gao left
her husband and struck out for a new life in Beijing. But
her little girl died of leukemia. Her husband remarried and
became wealthy selling pianos.

Checkoway asks her friend why any of the five Chinese women
opened up to her at all and told their stories.

"You wanted to know about us," Hong Xin replied. "Not
everybody who comes to China wants to know the simple
stories of women."

Checkoway writes about experiences she had in China nearly a
decade ago but tries, I think, to give those experiences
more weight than they deserve. She make generalizations that
can't be hung on the lives of just five women. She tries to
turn a perfectly attractive duck into a swan and strains
under the effort. Still, she's a good writer and the tales
she tells are interesting. But then get beneath the surface
of nearly any Chinese person in today's China and you'll
find a fascinating tale.